


hostis humani generis

by s0dafucker



Series: we said we hated humans (we wanted to be human) [2]
Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Blood and Violence, F/F, Non-Explicit Sex, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Bacchanal (Secret History), Recreational Drug Use, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:53:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28251198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s0dafucker/pseuds/s0dafucker
Summary: i am a good person. i am a powerful person. i don’t believe in evil. i think that evil is an idea created by others to avoid dealing with their own nature. i understand my own nature. good and evil have nothing to do with it.‘we don’t know what she’ll do,’ cameron says. ‘heather’s nervous.’‘no idea why,’ frances mutters, voice dripping with sarcasm, ‘it isn’t like the statute for murder never expires.’‘manslaughter,’ charlotte corrects- ‘it wasn’t premeditated.’cameron pushes his glasses up his nose and opens his mouth like he’s willing to debate the semantics, but frances dogears her page and says, ‘could we change the subject? it makes me feel sick.’
Relationships: Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran/Henry Winter, Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran/Richard Papen, Richard Papen/Henry Winter
Series: we said we hated humans (we wanted to be human) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794694
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	hostis humani generis

**Author's Note:**

> lesbian tsh 2 .... electric boogaloo ..... 
> 
> summary is from nervous young inhumans by car seat headrest (2018 version)

there's a tattoo on the inside of heather's bicep, and you trace it with your lips, feel her shiver under your mouth.  _ hostis humani generis,  _ it says, and you wish you hadn't slept with bunny, so you could keep yourself from picturing her matching script. 

(why’d she do that? or rather- why did you?)

(you were alone, frankly, lonely, cold and shaking and clutching heather’s jacket closed around you. coming down hard and cold and alone. judy was-

-somewhere, without you, with people who weren’t you, it made you sad- 

-and bunny was in her dorm, she was always in her dorm, and you weren’t thinking about marion and you weren’t thinking about heather- (-because she wouldn’t have thought of you-) and you were knocking on her door with your birds’-wrists, with your girls’-hands, and she could’ve been a god when she answered.

you reached for her and she didn’t refuse, she held you in her hands warm and strong and you thought her quite handsome, in the dim orange of the streetlights, with her jaw sharp and damp with sweat. she poured you cheap scotch and spared you the usual exaggerated cough when you opened a window to smoke.)

(maybe she looked enough like heather, or she looked different enough, or you just wanted foreplay that didn’t involve a drive to the countryside.)

_ hostis humani generis.  _ matching tattoos. you decide you aren’t going to ask, but as you bite down and heather tugs at your hair, you think you can figure it out. enemies of mankind. 

she shares a cigarette with you, and you look at her body and she lets you. it feels terrifying and fragile for her to let you, bedsheet ‘round her waist, the coal lighting her face from below. she’s firm under your hands, endlessly unyielding. she's firm under your eyes, and you think of how sickness could've made her frail, and of how strong she is now. 

(blood in an arc, black in the moonlight like tar on her mouth, her glasses, her teeth shining with a predator's grin. your hands-)

your hands in her hair, palm flat on her clavicle, her breasts warm and soft, her arms corded with muscle. you're playing at reverence and she likes it. she wants you to kneel in prayer and you are obliging. you finger the switchblade in your pocket and you hold her cheek in your hand, you kiss her with your tongue tasting like ash. you could kill her. 

(the urge is there, dark red and alkaline-bitter in your mouth, makes you shake like a week without a smoke, makes your hands sweat. you won't. you know you won't.)

you beg judy for an adderall, over wine coolers and cigarettes in the damp spring air, vermont's claustrophobic imitations of warmth; she gives you two and they scrape your throat on the way down but in an hour when the high kicks in you will be so, so grateful for the excuse not to speak. heather will look at you with her eyes ice-blue and expect more than you have to offer, your own thorn-ravaged throat, blood-wet hair- 

'you're shaking,' cameron says absently, and you think he's lying. you tuck his hair behind his ear and his dull eyes flick to you, stone-gray and tired. you're staring. you're sitting around the kitchen island, rickety stools and cameron in a cable-knit sweater and bunny's voice carrying over from the living room. he's lighting a cigarette and he's passing it to you. 

'she killed that man, didn't she? not all of us. just her.' his tone is contemplative, almost light. you can't speak. your pulse is beating in your shoulders. 'and you covered for her.'

you pass the cigarette back. it's trembling. you feel calm. your body feels like marble. 

'she'd kill you, you know. if she had to.'

you're calm. your body is too still. he hands you the cigarette and you can feel the drag lingering in your legs, in your arms. someone is talking in the living room. someone is talking with your mouth.  _ she wouldn’t,  _ says the ghost with your voice. 

the corner of cameron's mouth quirks up, a half-smile, half-cynical, his eyes bored and boring into your heart. burying. 

'if you say so.' 

spring is coming in fits and starts, thawing, the kind of weather you  _ should  _ have been running around the woods in- 

(steam in the air, her glasses fogged up and splattered black, red-black black-red steam out into the open air, your eyes moving sluggish, concussed, down down down-)

heather tilts your chin up, her gaze amused. you’re gaping at her chest in her shirt again, the muscles in her arms. the knife-blade of her collarbone. it’s damp and warm and the sun casts her in gold, her eyes chlorine-blue. there’s dirt under her nails, her sleeves pushed up to her elbows- 

(dirt under her nails, dark streaks up her forearms-)

she kisses you and you think not for the first time how very like a war-room strategy it is, to kiss you and wipe you clean of doubt. you enjoy it anyway. she’s warm and fresh and tastes of ash, wet and alive. wet and red. steam in the cold air. 

frances corners you after greek with something fierce and strange in her eyes, something like a question or a confession, but all she does is invite you to dinner with the twins. 

she’s doing her lipstick obsessively, barely aware of it, the tube shaking faintly in her hand. her nails are painted black and bitten short, chipping at the edges. she does another pass of plum-red, dark like a wound, and blinks, her lashes long and dark. 

‘sorry,’ she says, her mouth quirked up in an odd sort of smile; ‘i know this is sudden.’

you take a drag on your cigarette. you aren’t sure what she means.

‘it’s just-’ the cap of the lipstick, a final understated smack of her lips- ‘i don’t know, honestly. i’m glad you’re here.’ 

you don’t realize you’re aching for a drink until cameron’s scotch finds its way to your hand, his broad palm over yours like a lightning rod, like stigmata- oh to be bleeding. oh for this to be a wound, this antler-gored sensation of red-hot emptiness. something has been extinguished within you and the creeping flame of liquor beneath your ribcage makes a valiant attempt at reigniting it.

‘bunny and marion broke up,’ charlotte says, drops it into the quiet with her airy tone, levity and gossip that don’t mix well with the way your heart stutters, like someone’s misremembered the fire diamond, stored your flammables with her highly-reactives -

‘any idea why?’ frances is fishing in her pockets for a pack of cigarettes when she asks, and you’re staring aimlessly at her dark-brown tweed, a jacket that must cost more than most things you own. 

charlotte, shoulder to shoulder with her on the loveseat, kicks her feet up on the coffee table and runs her hand through her hair in a flurry of movement, all white-gold and bird-fluttering. ‘nope.’ 

they’re smoking, with the one lighter they share between them, and beside you cameron taps your shoulder and offers his lucky strikes.

(you realize, belated, that they’re  _ your brand  _ now. you’d noticed frances had stopped offering, had expected you to carry a pack of your own, maybe thought her marlboros were too cheap for you-)

frances passes you her lighter and there’s a long quiet moment when the cold spot in your chest tightens and aches to the rhythm of your first drag. charlotte bustles around moving the ashtray to the coffee table, murmuring absently about fixing dinner, like a goddess in the dim, sundressed and lipglossed. you think- you hope- the subject is dropped, of bunny and of marion and of your new status as homewrecker. maybe that’s dramatic. 

(‘don’t be dramatic,’ heather says, cool and quiet, and you take a breath, you take a breath in that makes your shoulders shake, and you say, into the cold air, ‘d’you have a cigarette?’ because you think it’ll help with the sick anxiety that’s making your skin crawl. you don’t look at your hands. you don’t need to see. she sets it between your lips herself when she sees your arms limp at your sides and you pretend that you don’t taste the coppery-bright smudge she leaves on the filter. she cups the flame and you’d call the gesture maternal if referring to it as such didn’t sting with  _ wrong. _ )

‘bunny and heather are going to rome,’ frances says in her disdainful purr, flicking absently through charlotte’s annotated copy of anne carson’s  _ oresteia.  _

‘oh,  _ god,  _ shut up,’ charlotte says, draining the last of the scotch into her mug. ‘if i have to hear about that one more time- from anyone- i’ll lose it.’ 

frances rolls her eyes. ‘heather thinks it’ll calm her down,’ she says, mostly to you. ‘because she’s getting antsy.’

‘you think she’ll go to the police?’ you ask, incredulous- you’ve heard bunny talk about the cops before, and you don’t think she’d call them if you put a gun to her head. 

‘we don’t know what she’ll do,’ cameron says. ‘heather’s nervous.’

‘no idea why,’ frances mutters, voice dripping with sarcasm, ‘it isn’t like the statute for murder never expires.’

‘manslaughter,’ charlotte corrects- ‘it wasn’t premeditated.’

cameron pushes his glasses up his nose and opens his mouth like he’s willing to debate the semantics, but frances dogears her page and says, ‘could we change the subject? it makes me feel sick.’

you expect silence, you expect the torch to be dropped unceremoniously- but charlotte in her drunkenness counters quick and easy with, ‘did you really get pneumonia?’

frances looks up, dark eyes flashing roadkill-bright behind her pince-nez, and you feel uncomfortably microscope-pinned. 

_ pneumonia  _ is what heather’s been saying, her excuse for coming back early while everyone was home with their families, greasy-fingerprinted postcards from bunny and color-coded letters from the twins, a collect call or two from frances and her mother; really, she told you, she had been missing vermont. she stared up at the falling snow and the streetlamps and she looked down at you and said, ‘i’m giving you a coat,’ in a tone that brokered no disagreement.

‘it wasn’t too bad,’ you say, to charlotte and the room at large, studying your nails- dusty pink, at judy’s recommendation- ‘honestly, i think she’s exaggerating.’ 

_ i missed vermont  _ was an easy way for her to admit she missed you. you could understand that. 

frances is enthralled, unfortunately, but you remember enough details from med school to rattle off some symptoms- 

and it’s not a far cry from the truth. you were fevered from the cold when heather arrived, saintlike, to press her broad wrist to your brow and carry you over her threshold like newlyweds. 

(she did that for you, let you cling to her in your barely-autumn clothes, your borrowed jackets and velvet slip dresses, hosiery scarcely thick enough to keep you from shivering. in retrospect, you see your own stupidity in crystal-drop clarity, but at the time- 

you lived icey-cold and trembling in a stress-induced haze, piling cardigans and sweaters on top of each other and playing damsel to heather’s knight when she came back to vermont. it was a sweet fantasy, to drink her coffee and smoke her cigarettes.)

(blood bounces on snow, you learned, panting and shivering in her oversized jacket, staring at her flushed pink and shining, staring at her bright gaze behind her frosted glasses, at the pinprick pupils in the wine-dark sea of her eyes.)

(she wears men’s cologne, something dusky and expensive, the scent that lives in the ever-growing pile of her clothes that you’ve stolen, pieces of her to hoard for yourself, the smell of her cologne and her cigarettes and underneath the smell of her skin when you pull the collar of her sweater up over your nose. you wonder what lovers do when one of them has died. if there are widows sitting awake at night burying their faces in the too-large sleeves of a sweater they never meant to return.)

the cashier at the pharmacy scrutinizes your california driver’s license for a long few seconds, but eventually he hands it back and asks, ‘lucky strikes, you said?’

bunny catches you after greek, with her hands shoved in her pockets, with her hair wild, fuck you for thinking you could stop to light a smoke without her appearing in the liminal space outside-you to ask if she can walk you home. 

she’s dodgy, sometimes, with you- afraid of crossing some lines and showing a disregard for others, never with the casual touch she exchanges with heather or cameron; you wonder idly if she’s worried about outing you. you think briefly of tripping so she’ll catch you, fleeting and romcom-stupid, wishing she’d reach out and rest her hand on the small of your back, reach out and hold your hand - 

you used to watch her cross the quad with marion, sometimes, and you long for that intimacy, that public declaration, something that tastes like foreign language in your mouth, something that sounds thin and girlish and needy in the voice you imagine as yours. 

knife's-edge, you think, walking beside her, hearing her voice wander- low, it's lower than yours, it's low and scotch-sweet; you wonder how she has that note of worn-out tenor without smoking, without anything but running herself ragged talking to anyone who'll listen. 

('have you and bunny-?' it sits wrong in your mouth as soon as the words form, and heather stiffens beside you; not a change one would notice if it weren't for the proximity, tense as she is, but she laughs, bitter, and says, 'of course.')

bunny runs her sub-par italian past you and- the yearning affection boils, bubbles over, like foaming at the mouth- you think, as blood-hot and stupid as it is, if you killed her-

'she's getting us a villa, can you believe it? probably a shithole, but what can you do-'

heather wouldn't hurt you. you know it. you've seen her lusty and drunk and dripping red and she's never- she wouldn't- 

'the goddamn catholics, though, i'd have to wear a  _ dress  _ or something awful, pick up some girl drag- be a proper lady and all-'

she could. sometimes she wraps her hand around your throat- not with pressure, not with anything, just with that sharp leer and the knowledge that  _ she could-  _

'd'you think heather's got girls' things? i know her folks like her to be, y'know-'

she would. cutthroat. you admire her for it, don't you? the cunning. the ambition that pauses for no one, stops at nothing, a needlepoint urge to fight. self-preservation radiates from her and your skin will peel away if you stand too close. 

' _ladylike_ - you know, that's why she cuts her hair like that- hides the scar-'

push someone else into the blast radius, right? that's what you do. that's acceptable. pull the lever and reroute the trolley.

'you've stayed with her, right? ramona?'

bunny's stopped. you look at the cigarette in your hand, like  _ the shining _ with the ash a mile long, and you look at her eyes blinding blue-white in the setting sun and you say, suddenly, 'this is my dorm.'

she blinks. you could do it now, if you wanted. your knife is sitting heavy in your pocket- for rapists, you told frances. for men following too close at night. bunny's throat is pale and vulnerable and you've kissed her jugular, before, left a mark that made her blush dark in the mirror and the morning dim. 

'i- i'll ask.'

they would bury her in women's clothes. you couldn't do that to her. 

you stay up late. you do your translations. you take off heather's sweater and put it back on and you open a window to smoke and the chill goes right through you, the knit's too wide, the fabric's too thin, you're too fragile; not built for this, not your lungs or your bones or your faded-out tan. you can't leave. you should. it hits you on the third cigarette in a row that the best course of action- the logical one- the advice you'd give- is to catch the first bus to anywhere but here. to go south. to go west. 

as you're lighting the fifth and abandoning your work it's the foolishness that feels like enlightenment, that feels clear and pointed, that you're being stupid and young and flighty. nervous. always with your cautious hands. you can't leave. you need your fucking degree. you're just-

('overreacting, really,' she says, and her hand is fever-warm on your shoulder, should be a comfort, as you shake and sob and stare at the man on the ground.

'his head,' you keep saying, your voice far-away and not belonging to you, 'his fucking head.' you want to scream. you don't have the breath. your breath is coming in fog, in too-quick increments of crying and sniffling, the spot on your shoulder filling with cold when she removes her hand and paces, sizes up the body like an auctioneer. you look at her instead. how did she crush it like that.  _ it's fake,  _ you think suddenly, and the hysteria is giddy and light when it comes up your throat and you snicker through the wetness in your nose and mouth and chest.

she looks up. she's polishing her glasses on the hem of her shirt. 

there's steam rising from the head, from the fleshy ugly thing that used to be a man. heather didn't get his name. she looks at you and her face is naked without the glasses and her dead eye is gleaming just as flat and bright as the other. she's grinning. she's breathless. breath-taking.)

judy's tying your tie. you don't remember why you're letting her. she kisses your cheek and you touch the spot, your fingers sticky with lipgloss, and there's something so bare and sad in her eyes that you have to look away. she untucks the hair behind your ears. she thinks you look better with it looser, likes the way your shitty homegrown haircut frames your face. why do you know that? 

'i've got a jacket for you,' she says, and still she's fussing with your collar, your tie, the tuck of your shirt into your waistband. you feel an odd sort of sentimentality, a childish affection. like you'll cry. you don't think you'll cry.

bunny and heather leave for rome in a week.

'thanks.' you swallow on a rough, smoke-scraped throat. 'really.'

judy waves her hand, dismisses it; just like that, bird's-wings, like it doesn't even matter. where does it come from? the ability to make things so light? so easily put away? bunny and heather leave for rome in a week. what if you could toss it away. let it leave you. 

'd'you want a joint?'

it does not leave you. it weighs on you, on the delicate stretch of skin between your breasts, the thin plasticy plane of your sternum. you go through greek in a daze. julian compliments your work and heather presses a kiss like a secret into your hair, into the space behind your ear. you don't say anything. she whispers  _ beautiful,  _ she whispers  _ my dante,  _ her greek rolling and guttural, and you stare down at your work until the letters blur.

you sleep with her, and by  _ sleep with her  _ you mean to say that she eats you out until you cry and tells you in a whisper that you could run away together, the two of you, and you could be happy, and your heart jumps into your throat before you remember that your arrangement does not end at  _ partners.  _ you are criminals. you are-

('murderers,' frances murmurs, dragging her hands through her hair, tugging the curls into nothing, 'we're murderers. we can't- we can't do this. we can't stay here.'

heather is smiling into her mug and you pretend not to see. cameron eyes you across the table and you are grateful for his silenced voice, because you've got the most strangling feeling that he would say something horrible otherwise, something incriminating, but you don't know how- what else is there to say? you've all done it together. you've all done it.

'honestly,' heather says, 'that's the best it could've gone.'

you see her point. sacrifice. 

there are thorn-wounds lacing up your arms and when they scar it will look like a different crime and you'll wish it was.)

there’s a knock at the door and you don’t know what time it is but it’s dark, you’re wearing heather’s shirt, you’re sleeping beside her, and you wake up what feels like a heartbeat before the knock really comes. you feel ghostly. you feel like you’re dreaming. you answer the door.

it’s bunny. 

she’s crying- you think- and she’s wringing her hands, fiddling with her belt loops, pushing her hair out of her eyes-

you start to say something, and you know if it comes out it’ll be  _ you need to leave, you can’t be here,  _ whip-quick panic, like if you have bunny and heather both in your bedroom someone will die. someone won’t make it out. god, you can’t have that on your hands, not in your dorm, not here-

‘d’you have a cigarette?’ she asks, and your heart stutters- 

‘y-you don’t smoke.’

you take her downstairs, you take her outside, you usher her out the door and grab a pack on your way out and you sit on the front steps with her in the dark. 

she used to play football. frances or someone told you, she’d bullied her way onto her highschool team and accepted all the shit she got, the most athletic of your band of scholars. seeing her smoke is uncomfortable at the least, paranoia-inducing if you stare too long, the smoke blue in the night, her hand trembling slightly. 

‘bunny,’ you light one of your own, because the smell sets your nerves on edge, ‘what’s going on?’

‘these are good,’ she says, considering her cigarette, ‘i get it now. not worth heart cancer, but-’ she drags on it, and you see her swallow a cough. 

‘you should’ve started with menthols,’ you say reflexively. 

there’s a silence, then, just the moths and the lights buzzing and she stubs out the cigarette and looks over to you- her gaze snags on the mussed collar of your shirt and you brace yourself for the jab at your theft of heather’s clothes, something about the money you’ve got back home, but she just looks and there’s something very bare in her eyes, and you feel something like a premonition. some horrible bloody image of her betraying you, you betraying her, something that feels suddenly like your hearts are connected. like alliances have shifted and the planes of the earth have moved enough to set you off balance and bunny asks if she can share your smoke and you stare at her too-perfect teeth. 

‘i can’t go to rome with her.’

she passes the cigarette to you, shaking, and she smiles in that giddy way that comes with the verge of tears, russian-roulette, and your heart is pounding somewhere outside of you.

‘i can’t- i won’t- she doesn’t trust me. i know it.’ 

‘what do you-’

‘she killed someone.’

you don’t remember what you should and shouldn’t know, don’t know what she’s been told, so you take a drag and hold it until you’re dizzy, until you start to feel sick.

you want to speak. you think you will, really, you’re reaching down your throat for something reassuring, something honest, something like  _ i can help you,  _ something that will stop the horrible nauseous film-reel of her funeral that is spinning behind your eyes, but you open your stupid, useless mouth, and the door creaks open behind you.

(you can’t keep doing this. you’re sitting in the passenger seat of her car and you can’t keep doing this, you can’t, because you’re sick, you’re sick and it’s starting to get to you, really, it’s starting to eat away at something inside you because you can say  _ she made me she wanted to  _ all you want but- 

the man in the trunk made a pass at you. you can say that. even if you slit his throat because you’re sick and you wanted to- 

you slit his throat when he left the restaurant for a smoke, you slipped out in his shadow and he said something disgusting and- you moved on instinct, on shiny-new reflexes that spark and tighten your muscles into pushing this man old enough to be your father down into the dirt and breaking his nose with the heel of your shoe. you spit in his eye- stupid, DNA evidence, stupid rookie move, but it was worth it for the way he cried.

you’re sitting in the passenger seat of her car and she’s got the radio on, some shitty oldies station, and she’s humming along and you can’t keep doing this but you don’t know how to stop. you don’t know how to keep from craving the feeling of  _ god  _ running through your veins, the dionysian catharsis. 

the ground is too frozen to dig, january chill, and so heather drives out to the river and throws the body with a death-stiff sound that makes you wince.

you’re wiping your knife down with an old shirt and a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the glove compartment and you’re fixing your hair in the side mirror and when she stops in front of her place you follow her upstairs without thinking about it. you wonder if there’s a sexy way to suggest burning off your fingerprints.)

there’s a long silence broken when your cigarette burns down to the filter, your whispered  _ fuck  _ when you drop it- both of them turn to you, eyes like roadkill, and then heather relaxes, visibly, her broad shoulders at something like a contrappesto, something strong and marble, and she says, quietly, ‘good evening,’ but it comes out all wrong, you know it. she can’t read a room to save her life. you feel like someone’s being held at gunpoint. 

‘i’ve gotta be up early,’ bunny says. ‘i just needed a- a smoke.’

she looks at you and there’s that horrible tender thing in her eyes and it looks like an exposed jugular in all the worst ways and you don’t twist the knife but god, god as your witness you don’t remove it. 

you're too close to heather, you know it, sewn into her skin, but no one knows- no one can tell- frances and charlotte are telling you  _ she's crazy  _ over cocktails and cigarettes and abandoned piles of homework,  _ she's crazy, right?  _

you keep looking, stupidly, to cameron, expecting that  _ crazy bitch  _ kind of bite, that misogynistic ex-girlfriend shit, but he’s quiet, he’s always on the edges of the room. he's melting into the walls, you think, but you blink to clear your head and he's just looking at you like he's staring down the barrel of a gun. deer in headlights. don't think about headlights. 

you’re sewn into her skin with her, your heart to hers and beating in sickly tandem, blood-to-blood like vampires and plague doctors, like bloodletting, like she's drinking your veins dry and you’re smiling and thanking her. like you’re praying to her.  _ she’s crazy, right?  _ you nod. you’re nodding and biting your bloody cuticles and  _ she's crazy, how didn’t we see it, how didn’t we know- right? right? _

cameron invites you to chess in the library. 

he meets you in the classics section with the air dusty and temperature-controlled, in a turtleneck that makes him look lean and ghostly, his eyes nearly white. corpselike, you would say, if you had ever seen an elegant corpse.

he plays white and moves first while you study his shadowed eyes, the rough rasp of his unshaven jaw, his delicate wrists. his fingers are scarred- his nails nicotine-stained- he slides his pawn two squares and looks expectantly up at you.

you scootch a pawn forward.

he considers the board. you don’t know what he’s looking for.

‘we could leave tonight,’ he says softly. his fingernails are bluish-white on the head of his bishop.

‘i- excuse me?’

a glimpse of his slate-gray gaze, the distant curiosity in his raised eyebrows.

‘you and i. my sister. frances.’ the black knight in your shaky grip. ‘bunny, even.’

he loves heather- you thought you could say that for certain. you ask him as much.

‘of course.’ the quirk of his lip into a wry smile. ‘but i wouldn’t go to jail for her.’ he captures a pawn. ‘i wouldn’t die for her.’

there’s an unspoken accusation. you don’t know if you can dispute it.

‘she does her laundry at my house, you know.’

the charm in his voice reminds you strikingly of charlotte, some sarcastic spin on her lighthearted tone. you put him in check.

‘is that supposed to mean something to me?’

your pulse is pounding through the pads of your fingers. his nails are too-short. bitten ragged. he shifts his king stage-left.

‘lots of wine stains.’ he watches you move. ‘on a few of your shirts, too.’

you wonder if that’s really what she told him. or if he’s trying to be delicate. 

‘they weren’t-’ innocent? undeserving? you’ve shown your hand and you aren’t sure if you even have an excuse. he captures your bishop.

‘i know.’

what, then. what is his angle. what does he want, cameron with the angelic slope of his cheekbones into his jaw, his kind eyes carved from marble. there’s no way he trusts you, but still this is an out, that he’s giving you, a way to escape everything that’s been making you suffocating-nervous for what feels like years. why would he offer you that.

‘where would we go?’ you’re whispering, almost. it strains your throat.

his pale fingers hover, trembling, over his knight. you see an avenue to checkmate but it registers very faint and muted in the back of your thoughts. 

‘anywhere. europe, maybe. cuba. south america.’

it’s fantasy. you know, somehow, with sickly, unwavering certainty, that you can’t leave. unwilling or unable or just trapped by fate. you’re tied to hampden- because of her, obviously, but you know, with some awful sense of foreboding, that even if she wanted to leave she couldn’t. 

(she's lying still next to you. you can feel the warmth of her. is she sleeping? blinking under her eyelids? the pounding of her pulse through her veins- can you hear it? her breathing is uneven. her lungs are worn. tumors forming, isn’t that right. she’s dying slowly already. you’re killing yourselves one way or another or another. killing one another. could you slit her throat, without waking her? could she yours? creep through the dark like a stranger in her home, steady with your matching blades, steady with the lantern swinging in the night knowing eurydice is behind you, surely, you aren’t alone here, you aren’t being followed by anything but a lover. you’re being followed. you’re being followed.)

her fingers are inside you and you wonder if she would be this tender with a stab wound, if she would coax the blood from your abdomen the way she curls her fingers up into your pulse and makes you moan into her mouth; it’s a sick fantasy, and a shitty one at that, to think she would dirty her hands with your blood, but god if it doesn’t make your stomach flip to think she would risk it for you. to feel you one last time. to make you more than another body on the pile. would they see it, in your autopsy? that you’ve been touched like a lover? like a victim? she’s kissing you and you’re running your tongue over her uneven teeth, all the ugly bits of her that fit together into something sublime, in the most literal sense of the word.  _ beauty is terror,  _ you whisper, a lifetime ago, and you sink your nails into her broad back and ignore the stinging of tears in your eyes. 

she lights a cigarette for you, after, her glasses down her nose, passes it over, and you see her in orange-tinged glimpses when you inhale, the baroque impression of her. she makes a handsome murderer. 

enemies of mankind. you think it's sort of fitting, that they would kill each other.

(the police will ask you, as you're walking through a dream, a girl underwater, if you knew they were together. a  _ lovers' quarrel,  _ they call it, with their smiles jagged like wolf's-teeth, poisonous. you will hear one of them mutter  _ bulldykes  _ and you will not flinch in any perceivable way. you will sit quietly and think of charlotte's easy femininity. you will cross your legs at the ankle. you will trade the gun to cloke for an 8 ball. you will not ask what he wants it for. he will not ask why you're giving it away.

you will attempt, in a ghostly state, to burn off your fingerprints with the end of a lit cigarette. you will not remember the way they grappled like fighting dogs and you will especially not remember the serrated edge of her cough, in bed beside you. you will not remember the way the bedsprings creaked when she stood up. you will cut your hair with kitchen scissors until you look like a man in a fogged-up mirror. you will kiss frances's mouth when she straightens your tie and you will ignore the way she looks at you, like you're ill. you will wipe the sickly sensation of lipstick from your face. you will wipe the sickly feeling from your face. 

you will bury yourself in the woods in your funeral suit. you will lie in the dirt and you will not whisper apologies to the worms in your voice that cracks and wavers. you will not sob. you will not rip open the scab on your elbow from tripping outside a bar and you will not watch the blood soak through your shirt.

you will look bunny's father in the eyes. you will pretend to know him. you will not take note of the empty chairs. 

cameron will take you by the arm and drag you into the men's room and cut your lines on the sink and sit quietly when you scream into his chest.  _ what happened,  _ asks his heartbeat, and you don't know how to answer. you don't know if you can. you don't know anything. 

you will murmur something about this coke being cut with fentanyl and he will laugh and neither of you will mention how it crackles like a dying radio. how wet his throat is. how wet his eyes are. you're killing yourselves anyway, isn't that right. isn't that how it goes. 

you will think about slitting your wrists with the knife she gave you. you will lie in bed and trace your veins. you will lie in bed. 

(you will dream, sometimes. you will meet her in a train station. a ballroom. a bar with flickering lights. she will touch the wound in her head with her broad fingers and she'll give you a smile with her chipped tooth and you'll ask her if this is hell. you'll ask after bunny. 

'we're going to rome in the summer,' she'll tell you, and you'll look at her unseeing eye and you'll tell her that she should part her hair the other way. to hide the blood.)

you will let the clothes she gave you rot in your closet. you will smoke in your dorm until the air is thick. you will lie in bed. 

you will ignore the subtle deafness in your right ear. you will ignore the shaking of your hands. you will ignore the nicotine sickness in your stomach and burn your fingernails lighting another lucky strike. 

someone will ask if you're alright. someone will pass you a drink. you will accept both with plastered-on politeness. the man selling your cigarettes will give you a look that resembles disgust and you will find the knife in your jacket pocket and hold it too tight. press your thumb to the blade. you will feel awake, then.

you will pay in cash for your first tattoo. 

(ὄπταις ἄμμε will reside in the crease of your elbow, where it can be hidden.  _ you burn me,  _ wrote sappho, and you aren't sure if she meant women like heather. women with short hair and broad backs. machiavellian women with rough hands and imperfect teeth. you don't care.) 

a man will throw a punch at a young couple, boys in shirts advertising music you haven't heard of, and you will watch him and you will feel that dangerous thing in your chest freeze over and you will follow him, out into the night with the moths and the smell of pot, and you will listen to him try to hiss  _ faggot  _ through a broken jaw. you will miss his kidney by a small margin. he will sob anyway.

they're buried in separate states. that feels like a crime, to you. you will not look at the name on bunny's headstone. you will stub out a cigarette on it and whisper something funny, whisper something like the kind of apology she would've accepted.)

and in the summer, in gloves that are a size too large, you'll garden with the sun on your bare neck and cameron will bring you a cold drink and smile with something sad in his eyes, and you will think, maybe, that you're alright. charlotte and frances are playing croquet out on the lawn. maybe you could join them.

**Author's Note:**

> woo ....... this took a surprisingly long time lmao. i might revisit this verse bc i have a lot of thoughts on some deleted scenes that were cut for pacing so who knows. but thank u for coming along for this!!


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